John Whitlock
@ The Chicago Urban Art Society
3636 S. Iron St., Chicago IL
Opening Friday, May 1st, at 6:30PM
On view through Saturday, June 27th
“These declarations are all meant to insinuate a unitary God who accommodates Himself to human diversities. To my mind, the idea is not very stimulating. I will not say the same of this other one: of the conjecture that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone in search of some superior Someone (or merely indispensable or equal Someone), and thus on to the end – or better, the endlessness – of Time, or on and on in some cyclical form.”
— Jorge Luis Borges, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim
The works in Mirrored Infinity explore ideas of reflection, transformation and personal discovery. Drawing inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim, John Whitlock constructs broken narratives that reflect points of thought around existential and spiritual uncertainties.
Whitlock creates small black and white collages that are then scanned, and repurposed into larger mixed media compositions, stretching the boundaries of their original framework. Simple, familiar shapes are combined to create quasi-religious iconography; Gold is introduced as both a symbol of preciousness and an implication of age. For his video installations, Whitlock has run a video feed into an infinite feedback loop that he animates with simple camera movements, creating self-reflexive geometric distortions. The pulsing circular patterns and reflective mirror fragments manifest real-time, infinite transformation.
As the illusory literary critic in The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim might put it, Mirrored Infinity is a “detective story with a mystic undercurrent.” It’s about finding yourself in the search for another.
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